Free Candy For Everyone

My PC is dying. Today was possibly the beginning of the end. The poor thing has had problems for quite some time - the motherboard chipset fan is prone to failure. It’s given out once before, and when I called the manufacturer about getting a replacement they didn’t even pause to ask questions except “What’s your address?” They promptly shipped out a new fan and I was on my way.

Well, my fan started making wacky noises a few months ago and I realized it was about time to get another one. But I’ve been mostly using my MacBook, so I never got around to it. I only turn the PC on once every few weeks at this point. Well. That was true up until a few weeks ago when I met up with Soren Johnson at AIIDE.

Soren was the lead designer as well as the main gameplay and AI engineer on Civilization IV. We had a nice long chat at the conference and it got me wanting to dig up my copy of Civ IV. I hadn’t really played it significantly when it first came up because I was in the depths of my WoW addiction. I managed to pause WoW long enough to play a few games of Civ through (and even write up a review and some more thoughts and then even more thoughts).

I’m no longer really playing WoW (yup, still WoW free. I think I’ve played once in the last 2 months) so I’m free for other games! I added a feature to the sidebar where I show what I’m playing, in fact. Civilization has been tops of that list for the last few weeks. Re-reading my initial thoughts, I don’t disagree much with my early assessment. I do think that my initial impressions of each new Civ game are always negative. “Why’d they change this? Where’s this favorite feature of mine??” Then I go away and come back to it and fall in love. It happened that way for me on Civ III and even Alpha Centauri. So my return to Civ IV has lead me to forgive it for some of the things that are different (though I still want my bullet point list from my more thoughts post implemented!).

Back to the stated topic though. I still don’t have Windows on my MacBook and I only have the Windows version of Civ IV so I’m forced to boot up my PC to play Civ. This means instead of only being turned on once every few weeks it’s been on several times a week. I was playing Civ on it last night, in fact, and it was a-ok.

Tonight I turned it on and got to the Windows loading screen with the little bar that bounces back and forth. I waited and waited. Then waited some more. Eventually the bar stopped bouncing but Windows never loaded. I rebooted and managed to load into Windows Safe Mode. “Now what?” I thought to myself. I uninstalled some stuff and removed everything from my Startup folder but to no avail. It still won’t run in un-safe mode.

Don’t really know how this could have anything to do with my failing fan, but maybe my computer overheated from the strenuous Civ workout and that caused unhappiness in the hard drive. Or somewhere else, who knows? I’m a software gal, hardware is strange and mysterious.

I’m not freaking out as much as I might expect. Probably because I love my MacBook Pro. But seriously, I need to do something about my PC. Troubleshooting tips, anyone?

Firaxis released a bunch of Civ4 downloads today. First up is a new patch with a myriad of fixes, as all good patches should have. Since I haven’t really been playing the game (um. Ok, I haven’t been playing the game at all, no “really” needed, stupid WoW!), I’m not sure of the impact of these, but they’re probably cool.

The two other downloads are more curious. The first is the “SDK”. I put that in quotes because SDK stands for Software Development Kit. This isn’t really a toolkit that let’s you tweak stuff. This download is the source code to a chunk of the gameplay for Civ4. It seems absolutely insane to me! It’s a bunch of source files that require Visual Studio. With it, you can compile a DLL that you can then drop in to use your code instead of theirs. I can’t see what end users will know how to do this, except professional programmers! I write game AI for a living, I’m not gonna tweak theirs in my spare time. Whoa.

Who knows, maybe people who want to get into the industry can use this as a tool to experiment with and show off their skills. But it’s not all the game’s code, just a particular portion. From my cursory look, there doesn’t seem to be anything having to do with rendering or anything. So the burgeoning game developer can write a mod that does all sorts of crazy stuff and completely changes the way the gameplay works, but the game’s graphics engine remains the same. Which is fine, I guess.

The last download is the multiplayer pitboss. It’s a standalong application that you drop into your Civ4 directory. Note that you must patch the game up to the new patch, 1.6.1, or the pitboss won’t run (I learned that one the hard way). The idea is described on the official page here - basically it enables multiplayer games to continue in a turnbased mode even if not everyone is connected. So if Joe and Bob and Sue are playing a game, but Bob has to log off, Joe and Sue can finish their turns and log off. Then when Bob logs back and and finishes his turn, the pitboss will send out an email and tell everyone that they can take their next turn too. It sort of seems like an advanced way of doing a play-by-email game. I’m going to see if I can’t try this out with some friends and give my impressions. But given how long a game of Civilization takes, who knows if we’ll be able to get to it?

If anyone else manages to try it, let me know! I’m definitely interested in the idea of it.

What is going on today? There were three, count ‘em, THREE press releases involving Firaxis today. Firaxis is Sid Meier’s company, the developers of Civilization IV (and Alpha Centauri, don’t forget a classic fave of mine! Oh, and yeah, Civ III, Pirates, etc. Lots of great strategy games). Today I popped over to Blues News to get my summary of what’s coming out and going on in the gaming realm, and there were three press releases shown.

First, an announcement of an expansion pack for Civ 4. No big surprises there. Oh, and no actual information in the press release either, here’s the Blues News post and here’s the actual press release. It’s gonna be called Civilization IV:Warlords. And that’s all she wrote.

Next, Sid Meier’s Railroads! announced. I was a big fan of the original Railroad Tycoon. I haven’t really revisited the series for any of the sequels (despite the fact that they were created by Poptop, a company also responsible for gems like Tropico and Tropico 2, great games). But now the franchise returns to its creators hands. We’ll see what they do with it.

The last announcement reads like a joke about what a marketing department would come up with for a game. CivCity: Rome Announced! ??? It’s Civilization, a great beloved game, combined with SimCity, a great beloved game. It’s gotta rock! Well. That’s what the marketing people are hoping we’ll say. Me, I’m just laughing at the idea. This one is being developed by Firefly Studios, developers of the Stronghold series (a castle building strategy game - played the demo and thought it was nifty, but not cool enough to pick up the game). I’ll see what the game actually is, but it sort of sounds like Caesar (remember the Impressions City Builders, the fourth one of which is in the works at Tilted Mill). If that’s the case, it’ll be tough competition. The city builder market is not a growing one, and it CivCity is even set in Rome, the land of Caesar. I’m sure Firefly is a quality developer, so I guess I’m curious to see what they do, and how they actually tie it to the Civ franchise (if at all).

Yesterday I dropped on by Gaming Steve to see if he had any news about the upcoming World of Warcraft patch 1.10. He’s usually a pretty reliable source of information. What I found was this poll about how many hours people have put into WoW. If you scroll down and read the comments, you’ll find a lot of animosity towards the game. One guy sums it up pretty concisely,

I hate WoW. Boring. It’s the only thing people talk about.

Is this how all you non-WoW players feel? Is WoW talk driving you mad? I’ve definitely noticed the “watercooler” conversations have drifted firmly into WoW talk. Just the other day, there was an impromptu gathering in the hallway of about five of us talking all about our characters and progress and plans (it doesn’t help that almost all the members of my Crazy Cattle guild are my co-workers).

At lunch, I probably bored another co-worker greatly as I talked all about my plans to respec my Tauren druid and explained what that meant. Is there a point at which enough is enough? I’ve cut back on my actual time playing WoW so that I can fit in more of my other interests. I haven’t really cut back on how much I talk about it, however. Is this a problem?

I’m not sure. World of Warcraft is a truly fantastic game. It is engaging, feature rich, expansive, and ever growing. The world is large and there are still whole areas I haven’t visited. It is possible to exhaust the content, but I haven’t come even close to doing so yet. The game lends itself to anecdotes. Even before WoW, I would frequently have conversations sharing stories of gaming experiences. “I was playing Civ last night, and the Mongols tried to take out my capital but my culture was strong so it converted right back!” We would talk for quite some time about strategies or tell stories of any game we were excited about. We’d contrive anecdotes for games that weren’t really anecdotal. But now we’re playing a game that really is about telling stories. The idiocy of fellow players is a frequent favorite. The new abilities we acquire or the rare drops we receive are all great cause for excitement. Is it any wonder that we can’t stop talking about it?

I understand that there are people out there that love games but don’t play World of Warcraft. Yes, WoW gets a ton of attention from media, from bloggers, from folks at the watercooler. But we’re all willing to talk about something else. It just needs to be really great to pull us away from our regularly scheduled programming.

I bought Civ4 first thing when it came out, the special edition pre-order. So I was dismayed to find that though the manual was in English, the foldout chart of technologies and other information was in French. And my French just isn’t all that good. A helpful comment pointed me to where I could ask for an English chart. It finally arrived this week, so today I decided it was about time for me to give the game another try.

I haven’t played the game for a good while. Been a bit busy with other games (like Guitar Hero and the unrelentingly addictive World of Warcraft) as well as outside stuff. Yes, RL stuff! Anyway, I have tried to see if people are talking about the game. I’m really curious for when the full release of the tools for modding Civ4 will be released. Despite some snide comments I made about how moddable the game is, I’m ever hopeful for something intriguing and different to be done to the game.

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